In this game-changing episode, Michael Neal, Founder of Build My Team, shares strategies to hire high-performing team members. If you struggle with finding great talent, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What outsourcing hiring can do to lighten your load
– Why focusing on strengths over experience attracts top talent
– How to create roles that let employees be authentic
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder today’s guest here with us today is the one and only, Dr Michael Neal, and he’s going to not only demystify how to find great team members, but also give you what basically amounts to the business equivalent of a video game cheat code for any reluctant manager watching today or listening. If you feel like your growth is limited by your team or your inability to even staff that team, you are in for an absolute treat today. Who is Dr Michael Neal. He is the founder and chief executive officer of build my team. He’s a practicing optometrist in a private practice in Holly, Pennsylvania. Michael founded build my team to solve his hiring struggles in his practice by modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire. The process worked so well that he expanded it to help friends and now build my team services clients in over 40 states and Canada as well, and he’s here with us today. Dr Neal, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. I want to start off with what I think is one of the biggest myths that holds back business owners, and that’s this idea that they can’t find great team members, not like it’s hard, but that they can’t, and even if they did, why would those team members come and work for them instead of working at some bigger, cooler business somewhere else? So what do you think myth or truth?
Michael Neal
Oh, boy, that’s a big question on Pat Scott, first of all, thanks for having me on your show today. As far as can’t find people you’re looking in the wrong place and looking the wrong ways, build my team finds people all over the place routinely for our clients, but we’re looking differently than using the traditional resume hiring approach. We focus on on strengths and talents for finding people, and specifically not looking for folks with experience. And the reason we do that is that we measure how fast people learn, so you don’t need experience, you don’t have the bad habits coming into the position. Wow, if you’re open to doing something like that, you will get completely different results. And as far as are people looking in the right spots or not? Well, I think that if you are unhappy with your hiring results, and you’re not getting the folks that you want, by definition, it’s time to look elsewhere.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the things that I really like about that is that it’s an awful lot of fun to learn new stuff, and it adds a lot of value for folks coming in. And one of the things that that really forced a lot of employers to rethink during the COVID pandemic was people didn’t accept a whole lot of nonsense, right, especially in the hiring process. There was a phase there, and you could argue that we’re still in it to some extent now, where folks had jobs that they liked, or they knew that they could find one, or they were willing to wait until they did. And so one of the things that that pushes on us, and especially in the small business community, is we have to compete to some extent, with other opportunities in a way that maybe we didn’t when there weren’t as many jobs available. And so in addition to being able to bring people in, train them up, develop new skills, what have you found great employees are looking for when they’re vetting a potential employer?
Michael Neal
Well, to tie back to the end of your first question, I think as far as vetting an employer goes, they’re looking for contribution. They’re looking great people have to make a difference. They want to go in. They want to be themselves, be their their authentic selves, use their strengths and talents, not be babysat or treated like they’re in kindergarten. They want to go in, do their thing and make a difference. That’s it’s paramount for high performers to be able to make a difference. You know, there so many small businesses think, Well, why would somebody want to work in my business when you could go to a monster Corporation? Well, they don’t want to be drones in a monster Corporation. Yes, they want to come into a small, medium sized business. Of course, your your compensation has to be reasonable, but it doesn’t have to be stratospheric. If you can create a position that they roll into every day, utilizing their natural strengths and talents, like what build my team finds these people love it, and they love helping folks. They love being part of a high performing team. It’s addictive when, if you’ve ever been on a high performing team before, and you go back to a lower, mediocre performing team, like, get me out of here. You want to work with the best.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. That’s so true. So one of the things that, to some extent, is a little different in the small business world for CEOs that are building a hiring system even, is that that hiring system has to produce people that they like, because they’re going to work with them, right? One on one. And you don’t have the benefit, if you will, of just hiring whoever, and then someone else has to deal with it. Not that that’s ever an appropriate hiring strategy, but you feel it more acutely in small business. So what is the key to creating a process, a hiring process that consistently brings in folks that you actually enjoy being around?
Michael Neal
Well, I think number one, they have to be themselves at work. And what I mean by that is the way build my team approaches, it ties the extremely tight fit between what the job requires and what the person is able to do, performance wise. So that means that the person shows up and it’s they’re themselves all day long. They don’t really understand why what they’re doing is so special. And from the other side, on the boss’s side of the CEO side of things, you get to work with somebody who, A is excellent at what they do. B does not need to be babysat and C, they they’re themselves, like they’re not playing a role. They’re not acting. They don’t have that cognitive load on their brain all day long to try and be someone else and be inauthentic. Those folks, you’re not going to want to be around them for more than two minutes and and that is, I think, one of the keys to really finding those great people on your team. The other part is, when they are themselves, they can be themselves at work. They can have that sense of humor. They can play jokes on each other. You know, make it fun, because at the end of the day, we all, we all have a certain amount of time we can allocate to work. Let’s make it as productive, as lucrative and as fun as possible.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, couldn’t say it better. So digging in a little bit deeper. So for these folks who don’t need to be micromanaged, they they show up, they want to contribute. What are some of the the traits that we can look for that would put someone into that this category of most likely to succeed?
Michael Neal
Well, it all depends on the position, and that’s critical. I mean, there are some some general things, for example, stress tolerance. That’s something we measure incredibly accurately, because some businesses require a high stress tolerance for the position, and some, most certainly don’t. In health care, a really high volume medical practice is high stress, low volume concierge practice, different level, right? And that applies to any role. If you extrapolate that out, I think that the that type of, you know, it’s not a catch all per se that works across all the professions or the jobs. It’s more the fit for the position.
Scott Ritzheimer
Okay, I like that. And have you found any like, what are the most common trends that you see in that? So it’s unique to each one. Have you found anything to be common among smaller businesses, or maybe even in the medical field? The Medical field’s a really interesting one to me, and we can dive into this for just a second, because there’s a handful of doctors that I go to that like They’re unbelievable. They’re so good at what they do, and it is agony to go to their office, because they’re just not great. They’re not as good at hiring as they are being a doctor, and so the front desk is a mess, and they’re rude, and it’s just not experienced, at least for me, is a very common one. So yeah, for folks, let’s just drill down there for a second. What are some of the traits that you see as being most core, the highest correlation with success for that group?
Michael Neal
For employees in a medical practice, you mean, yes, being themselves at work, the utilizing their strengths and talents. It’s not by position again, or, I’m sorry, it’s not a generality. It’s by position. I should say, let’s say, for example, you have somebody at the front desk of an office. That’s usually the first in person interaction that patient would have with a medical practice, you want somebody who is happy but also very focused on achieving the results that they have. It’s hard to describe to a person who’s not part of the medical field how intense a front desk position is. It is the nerve center of the entire practice. The transactional volume that goes through a front desk is usually anywhere between five to seven times the number of patients that are on the schedule. And for higher volume practices, it can be seven to even 10 times. So you think about that one person walks through the door, you got 10 different interactions with the front desk of various different levels over the patient experience. And so that type of person has to be able to handle that workload. They have to be able to handle that type of stress. They need to be efficient communicators. Have a very natural gift for following process and. And attention to detail. Now those are all things we measure, and that’s why we can put somebody in that position with such a great fit. Imagine if it’s the opposite. You know, what you just described a minute ago, essentially, was the opposite type of environment where the doc’s amazing, but the medical practice team botches it all over the place that fellow needs our number respectfully, and we would, the way we would approach that is to take his low performers and replace them with high performers and keep that up till there aren’t any more low performers on the team.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things, and I want to go to how you can get some help from the outside, because it’s really tough to do this on the inside. So I want to get there in just a second, but I want to speak to fast forward a little bit and speak to the post hire, what happens. So we’ve got onboarding and everything like that, and you guys do a fantastic job there, when it comes to managing the right people, well, that that’s different than just, you know, bring them in, tell them what to do once and then forever, expect them to do the right thing. So we don’t want to micromanage folks. And I don’t know about you, but I’m yet to bump into an entrepreneur or founder who said they started their company just to manage five people, right? That’s usually not the defining. So, but, but there is, there is a degree to which they can, they can get the most out of their team and create that fun environment. What do you think are some reasonable expectations for someone in terms of how they should manage once they have the right people on their team?
Michael Neal
The metaphor I like to use is that kind of talks to this situation. It comes from my experience with our own small business, the eye care practice. It’s a concept to getting the right people on the bus. Okay, everybody’s heard this before. You got to get the right people on the bus. It’s like, you know, there’s a magic wand that’s super easy for that to happen. Come on. People struggle their whole careers with this. Well, it takes you got to take it one step further. You have to get them into the right seats on the bus. And so for not a small entrepreneurial team, what you’ll find is that there are people with strengths all over the place and also heavy weaknesses all over the place. Don’t put your your team members, in a position where they’re trying to achieve a goal using their weaknesses, they’re not going to to succeed in any way. So instead, shuffle the people around and it you don’t need a large team to be able to do this. But let’s say you have a team of 10 people. Somebody on that team is going to love to do something you hate, somebody on that team is going to hate to do something you love, and everything in between. So what I what we saw in our own practice, to give you an idea of how crazy this is, 50% of the people within a couple percent, so half of the people that applied for a job at our practice ended up getting moved to a different role at the practice based upon their strengths and talents. Wow. So coin toss, a coin flip, they didn’t know what they were good at. That’s how crazy that is. So in a small business like you said, of five people, you got two and a half folks who arguably that don’t know really what their natural strengths and talents are. So you switch them around on the in the seats on the bus until you find something they really excel at, and then provide them a map of where they want to go. Put some guardrails on the road. As a leader, you always have to do that, and then get out of the way and let them drive the bus.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that, because so many times, especially when getting advice from people who specialize in hiring, especially if that advice comes from someone who’s used to hiring into bigger environments, it’s like, here’s the role Ultra define it, make them fit into it, and it does the exact opposite of what you opened with, of of them being themselves and and what small business leaders don’t realize is that they have way more flexibility just because of the simplicity of their team to really dial into the individual strengths of those team members. So I absolutely love that, and I what I’m hearing from you is also keeping an open mind once you’ve brought somebody in that that’s not the end of it, right? There’s an ongoing process of dialing it in and tailoring it to their strengths.
Michael Neal
If you want to be successful, that’s exactly how you do it. If you want to be average to mediocre, bring them in, put them into a position and never revisit it. I mean, that’s also how you really repel high end talent, is to not look at different ways to allow them to perform. And with really high end talent, you’re going to have to make some adjustments in how you work with them and in what you’re asking them to do. I’ll give you an example as a family member, well, I’ll give you an exact example. My son gave him a six week school project during the summer, I guess how long it took him to do the project? 12 weeks, my kids, okay, it was three days. I had no idea that I was I was I’m still blown away by that. I’m dumbfounded. It just so happened that the project I gave him nailed his strengths and talents to a team. Wow, look, this was a happy accident that this happened, and it really kind of refocused me on how incredible people can be performance wise, when you give them something they are stupendous at and in a work environment, look, that’s not gonna you’re not gonna take six weeks down to three days very often, but you will take six weeks down to a week a whole bunch of times if you give the person something that’s right smack dab in their wheelhouse, whether or not they realize it’s in their wheelhouse.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So one of the things that’s a real challenge at this stage is you have your own job to do, right? If you’re a doctor, you’ve got your patients to see. If you’re whatever, every founder has their own job to do at this stage, regardless of the industry. And so it feels like, how could I ever possibly do all of this when I still have my job to do? And so with some of that is, well, this is part of your job, at least, but the other part of it is you don’t have to do it alone. So what would you say to someone who feels that, who wants to do it right, feels the pressure to do it alone? How can outsourcing that be an advantage to them?
Michael Neal
Well, I can speak with details about our particular case. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re wearing 20 hats. That’s probably underselling it a little bit for a lot of entrepreneurs, but 20 major hats. How good are you at each of those 20? The answer is, you’re not. You might think you are, but you’re not. You’re dropping the ball. You’re you’re like, nobody can manage that number of projects Well, except for a handful of people. I would flip it and say, What if you found somebody, a group, a company, or whatever? That’s one of those hats. That’s all they did. And they were amazing at it, incredibly deep inside a super narrow niche. Now, if you can validate that they are actually as good at it as they say they are, and then they’re affordable, take that hat off. Hand it to them immediately spend a fraction of the time supervising what you just delegated to that team and then focus on the other 19 hats. What you’ll find out is that the really, really high end leaders in business only wear a couple of hats, and that’s it. They they have those, those teams or or outsource relationships where people focus on doing exactly that, and that’s all, and that’s where the magic comes from.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Dr, Neal, I got one more question for you here, and then we’ll make sure folks know how they can get in touch with you and your team there. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today, new.
Michael Neal
Okay, this will sound self serving, but in our practice, the unlock, the colossal, enormous unlock, was putting people into a position where they could be themselves, just be themselves. It sounds so simple, but that was the biggest unlock that we’ve ever had as a business. Net income went through the roof, headcount went down. Everything was completely unanticipated, and it’s so much more fun to be there because you’re dealing with people who aren’t acting. You’re they’re not worried about playing a role. They’re not trying to do something they suck at, none of that stuff. They’re just showing up being their awesome selves. And we get to have a really good time doing it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s awesome. There can be a whole lot of fun to be had, and I love that. It’s absolutely the best way to do it, for folks who are listening, who want some help with any of this, or they just want to learn more about you and the work that you and your team do. Where can they find out more?
Michael Neal
You go to buildmyteam.com, schedule a consultation. By no means do you have to be in the healthcare field. We deal with businesses of all different types. What we focus on are clerical, administrative, entry level and mid level positions. We’re not hiring executives, we’re not hiring doctors, anything like that. But if you know exactly the type of person that you’re looking for, we can narrow that down to strengths and talents that fit our software and boom off to the races.
Scott Ritzheimer
Amazing, amazing. Well, check it out. There’s a ton of great resources there as well. Dr. Michael Neal, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was just a privilege and honor having you here today. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Michael Neal
Dr. Michael Neal is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Build My Team. He is a practicing Optometrist in a private practice in Hawley, Pennsylvania. Michael founded Build My Team to solve his hiring struggles in his practice by modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire. The process worked so well that he expanded it to help friends, and now Build My Team services clients in over 40 states and Canada.
Want to learn more about Michael Neal’s work at Build My Team? Check out his website at https://www.buildmyteam.com/